Comments (20)

• Chris Cobb says:

  February 11, 2012 at 10:08 pm

  @ Konrad & Charles – I hate to say it but I think discussions like these might be bigger than what we can accomplish in a comments section.
  @ nz – I’m thinking the best outcome for all of this is that people get talk to each other more and maybe find common ground.
• konrad says:

  February 11, 2012 at 5:44 pm

  Speaking of crap: here’s the performance artist (ob art ref) Lenny Bruce at The Fillmore (SF), opening for The Mothers (7/25//66), his last concert. The whole bit is about the origins of the law, but here’s the relevant quote:

  “Look. Here’s our problem, see, we’re trying to get some sleep and people keep throwing crap on us. Now we want somebody to throw them right in the craphouse. And I’m delegated to do the hiring here, and, ah, here’s what the job is.

  “You see, they won’t go in the craphouse by themselves. And we all agreed on the rule, now, and we firmed it up, so there’s nobody gets out of it, everybody’s vulnerable, we’re gonna throw them right in the craphouse.

  “But ya see, I can’t do it cause I do business with these assholes, and it looks bad for me, you know, ah . . . so I want somebody to do it for me, you know? So I tell you what: Here’s a stick and a gun and you do it — but wait till I’m out of the room. And, wherever it happens, see, I’ll wait back here and I’ll watch, you know, and you make sure you kick ’em in the ass and throw ’em in there.

  “Now you’ll hear me say alotta times that it takes a certain kind of mentality to do that work, you know, and all that bullshit, you know, but you understand, it’s all horseshit and you just kick em in the ass and make sure it’s done.”

  So what happens? Now comes the riot, or the marches — everybody’s wailing, screaming. And you got a guy there, who’s standing with a short-sleeved shirt on and a stick in his hand, and the people are yelling, “Gestapo! Gestapo!” at him:

  “Gestapo? You asshole, I’m the mailman!”

  Full transcript posted here
• charles says:

  February 11, 2012 at 5:36 pm

  As others have said, there is no Black Bloc ‘group’ – there are a collection of people of all stripes (and races and genders and and and) who in different contexts choose to use those tactics. I don’t, but I also will defend such tactics and activists against the constant repetition of cliches and stereotypes right out of MSM reportage. Again, come meet us. These are NOT all ‘middle-class white kids’. The OO Tactical Action Group who organize the Fuck the Police actions was started by a bunch of young black kids from West Oakland.
  Ishmael Reed utterly embarrassed himself with that piece. No one here takes him seriously after publishing it. The ‘outside agitators’ are the cops – 93% of OPD live outside of Oakland. There is no evidence that OO is a bunch of white kids from other cities (unless you mean Cal students – god forbid they should be active in a political movement off campus). Business around Oscar Grant Plaza was UP during the camps. The Oakland Chamber of Commerce is made up of the 1% – all but one member represent banks or chains. Reed mentions the school closures but neglects to mention that OO brought hundreds of people to the protest and helped put that issue on the map. (and since followed up with another huge march and action focused on the school closures, involving local teachers and students).
  And again, given what OO’s accomplished – the first general strike in the US since 1946 (and organized in 5 days without organized labor), two port shutdowns, foreclosure defenses of minority homeowners, and numerous other peaceful actions, it seems that the impetus is on you to demonstrate how NV actions are tactically superior – beyond claims of moral superiority or the fact that some liberals freak out by a couple broken windows while the cops beat the shit out of us, and given that cities have organized with the DHS and FBI in coordinated attacks on camps all over the us, regardless of their stance on NV, where is the evidence that NV is a better tactic?
• NZ says:

  February 11, 2012 at 3:31 pm

  Clearly the OPD is out of control. To put it mildly. They’ve been brutalizing low-income people and people of color in Oakland for decades.

  And the answer to your question is simple.

  Q: “So maybe it’s worth asking: Why is Oakland so different? Why are these kids throwing things at police when they know they might end up in jail?”

  A: Because the Black Bloc are, for the most part, very comfortable middle- or upper-middle-class white boys who have enjoyed a truly staggering amount of social and financial privilege their entire lives. And it is precisely that privilege that fuels their behavior — as well as their thoughtlessness about how their behavior affects people who aren’t as privileged as they are.

  Let’s face it: they just don’t much care that they’re shitting where other people have to eat, and they don’t much care if Occupy Oakland, or Oakland itself, goes down in flames. If it does, they’ve got generations of white privilege and financial cushioning that they can peel back into at the drop of a hat. They may be slightly inconvenienced if things get unpleasant, but at the end of the day they’re not going to sink. And they know that quite well.

  There’s a reason you don’t see low-income kids of color among the ranks of the Black Bloc.
• konrad says:

  February 10, 2012 at 12:52 pm

  KPFA (Berkeley, CA) radio show “Letters and Politics” aired Feb 8th, 2012 in which “Chris Hedges and Kristof Lopaur of Occupy Oakland debate black bloc, militancy and tactics.”

  http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/77663
• Dravazed says:

  February 10, 2012 at 11:23 am

  If we can’t agree on what “good” means–at least in the course of doing Occupy work and organizing–then we ought not to be doing this at all.
• chris cobb says:

  February 10, 2012 at 11:18 am

  @joseph – maybe two terms we can agree on are “cops” and “agent provocateurs.”
• Joseph Thomas says:

  February 10, 2012 at 9:43 am

  Chris, what Charles was saying was that the Black Bloc is not an organized group. I’d also like to point out again that Occupy isn’t, either.

  All of this is extremely messy and dispersed, and that’s what it needs to be to expand – and I think we need to keep in this in mind, and be wary of any terms we use that can constrict our understanding into something simplistic. This includes the words “front lines”, “violence” and even “good” in addition to “group”
• packard says:

  February 10, 2012 at 9:14 am

  Black Bloc exists, but it is a tactic, not a movement or group. Many/most people who employ it are anarchists, but there are more varieties of anarchists out there than you can shake a stick at (swing a billy club at?) I personally am in favor of non-violent tactics and avoiding vandalism. I don’t see the end game with an alternate strategy. That being said, I am leery of pointing the criticism inward and tearing the movement apart from the inside. We know who the real culprits of violence are. The police came out aggressively with extreme hostility on that Saturday. Perhaps one or two people threw a water bottle or a rock and gave the OPD to unleash hell. I got beat in the legs, while dispersing in a totally passive area of the march (my back to them, walking away, never any aggressive gesture or action toward them), blocks away from the stand-off in front of the museum (as did many others who were in the peaceful act of dispersing). The answer really is in your article. OPD. It is also worth considering the number of agent provocateurs who could be throwing bottles.
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzOuD41hfnA
• chris cobb says:

  February 10, 2012 at 7:58 am

  @Konrad – Thank you for linking to that article. I believe it is both good and healthy to be discussing all these ideas and doing it in such a public way. I wonder if the Tea Party corporation ever had such open debates about whether to carry semi-automatic weapons to the rallies of Democrats they disliked? As far as I understand they did not. In fact it’s just the opposite:

  On Jan 3rd (2010), Think Progress posted an unsettling video of Tea Party activists in New Mexico who openly carried loaded guns and assault weapons as a threat against “the government” and President Obama.
  Nearly 350 right-wing protestors crowded a New Mexico town’s busiest intersection yesterday to protest President Obama’s supposed anti-gun agenda and the “government takeover of our health care system.” While the event mostly looked like any other recent right-wing rally — complete with signs reading “replace the communists in DC” and “the sky is falling! A black man is president!” — what set this protest apart was that there “were plenty of handguns and rifles displayed. (http://www.opposingviews.com/i/tea-party-activists-encouraged-to-bring-guns-to-anti-obama-rally)
• chris cobb says:

  February 10, 2012 at 7:49 am

  @charles – Right – there’s no such thing as the Black Bloc. So all the photographs and videos of people in black wearing masks and throwing stuff aren’t real? I know a number of individuals personally who believe they are “Black Bloc” so you might want to tell them they don’t exist. They also happen to be self-described anarchists. I’d also question if your “front lines” are the same as Ishmael Reed’s front lines – as he describes in the piece I mentioned. It’s all there – he explains the situation from the perspective of a long time resident of Oakland. It’s worth a look.
• charles says:

  February 9, 2012 at 2:24 pm

  Yes, please read Graeber’s response to the clueless Hedges. I’ve been involved with OO from the start, and I can tell you that there is no Black Bloc – it’s a *TACTIC*, not an ideology. Many of the anarchists involved (again, BB and anarchists are NOT the same – please stop making that mistake!) are some of the most organized, focused, and serious activists I know, and have been crucial to the success of OO from before the camp even began. They don’t ‘leech’ – they are the ones who built the camp, organized free food and health care and workshops. They don’t do this for fun of think of themselves a circus. Nor do they claim moral superiority like you do.
  Keep in mind that OWS kitchen kicked out homeless folks (terming them ‘freeloaders’) so please stop telling us how they’ve ‘worked’ (and ‘worked’ how? did they shut down a port? organize a general strike in 5 days? occupy and defend houses under threat of foreclosure?) Remember that occupying a vacant building would technically require ‘vandalism’. Tearing down the fence at 19th/Telegraph to escape a tear-gas OPD kettle was technically ‘vandalism’.
  Please come out to the front lines and meet us next time. You are more than welcome to demonstrate how the ‘moral superiority’ of non-violence ‘works’ by standing at the front of the line and taking your licks. Please explain to the elderly, disabled, children and undocumented among us how they should do this too, or how they should condemn shield-carrying anarchists from defending them.
• konrad says:

  February 9, 2012 at 2:10 pm

  FWIW this apparent “coda” has been answered by a brilliant cadenza. Since the nplusonemag.com site where it was originally posted has been knocked offline (midday PST 9-feb-2012), here is an except of David Graeber’s response to Hedges, kindly reposted by the folks at AKPress

  http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/concerning-the-violent-peace-police-an-open-letter-to-chris-hedges/
• chris cobb says:

  February 6, 2012 at 9:35 am

  Chris Hedges just published what appears to be the coda for this entire topic. A real smack down. He was a regular at Zuccotti park and frequently defended OWS on television. His piece is definitely worth a few minutes. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cancer_of_occupy_20120206/
• chris cobb says:

  February 6, 2012 at 7:45 am

  @joseph – one unintended consequence of the Occupy movement is that it has created hordes of instant “experts” on anarchism, revolution and social movements. These “experts” are those who hear about Occupy on TV or read about it in the paper and then write articles about it or worse yet, hold seminars on it. Yet, by dissecting it as if it were an abstract theoretical thing, one misses the entire point of Occupy; i.e.; that one should get up and do something.
  And there is nothing worse than seeing activists completely ignore a neighborhood or its history. The Ishmael Reed piece in the New York Times deserves several reads, as he packs a lot of information and well-considered sentiment into it. Reed by the way, is the real deal, a genuine expert on these issues. He’s definitely someone to be listened to.
• Joseph Thomas says:

  February 5, 2012 at 8:50 pm

  We should also take into account the actions called for through (not by- more on that in a line or two) Occupy Oakland – the shutting down of ports and the remaking of an abandoned government building into a social center. Neither of these are things that the city of Oakland can allow to happen – to do so would create a precedent too big to handle, and a confrontation for closing it later would be much more expensive and catastrophic.

  Called for through vs by – I think we also need to consider the level of organization within Occupy, and make a distinction between “movement” and “group”. I would argue that, without a definable structure, Occupy is able to expand beyond constrictions that are inherent in groups (Such as the Black Bloc, assuming that there is an actual organization with a group identity and tactics). I’ve written a bit on this here: http://arcdirector.blogspot.com/2012/02/occupy-as-form-joseph-thomas.html

  Lastly, I think the question of if violence or non-violence “works” is one that needs to be unpacked; I don’t believe it’s as simple as it looks at first. One question to consider is what Occupy would look like today – worldwide – if the first teargas-ridden conflict between OPD and OO had not occured. In that sense, a violent incident “works” to expose antagonisms. And, we need to be careful not to presuppose (and allow for) the right of a police force to use violence themselves. Occupy isn’t the only entity with tactics: and behind tactics we can (hopefully) see where values & power lie.
• Chris Cobb says:

  February 3, 2012 at 2:01 pm

  @B. zimmerman – Thank you for pointing that out. I made the correction. However, the OPD did indeed allocate $1.2 million for Operation Verdict.
  @GW – you might just be joking around, but this is from the Black Bloc entry in wikipedia:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Bloc
  “Police infiltration
  Police and security services have infiltrated black blocs with undercover officers. Since all members conceal their identities, it is harder to recognize infiltrators. Allegations first surfaced after several demonstrations. At the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, amongst the many complaints about the police there was mention of video footage in which “men in black were seen getting out of police vans near protest marches.”In August 2007, Quebec police admitted that “their officers disguised themselves as demonstrators.” On these occasions, some were identified by genuine protesters because of their police-issue footwear.”
• Geeeeee willuukers says:

  February 3, 2012 at 12:42 pm

  I thought the guy who assaulted Tim was an undercover cop
• B. zimmerman says:

  February 3, 2012 at 11:20 am

  Johannes Mehserle was a BART police officer, not Oakland PD
• Dravazed says:

  February 3, 2012 at 8:08 am

  Well written, timely, and right on. Occupation in this country began by being creative, adventurous, courageous and fun. Seeing it turn into a reprise of the Days of Rage in the Sixties is not encouraging. Hopefully feckless Quan will be recalled/unelected, and anarchism or no, some well-aimed lawsuits directed at the OPD need to happen and fast.